The Not-Obama Doctrine

“It’s time to change course in the Middle East,” Mitt Romney said on Monday, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute. His campaign had billed this as a significant address, one in which he would explain exactly what his foreign policy would be if he’s elected President. He continued:

That course should be organized around these bedrock principles: America must have confidence in our cause, clarity in our purpose, and resolve in our might. No friend of America will question our commitment to support them, no enemy that attacks America will question our resolve to defeat them, and no one anywhere, friend or foe, will doubt America’s capability to back up our words.

That may be the best summary of the Republican nominee’s foreign policy that anyone has provided so far. Romney talks big—“It is the responsibility of our President to use America’s great power to shape history—not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events,” he says. But when it comes time to talk specifics, we are left with Romney’s “bedrock principles”: we should be confident, be nice to our friends, stand up to our enemies, and keep our promises. That’s not the core of a strong foreign policy; it’s a series of lessons to be taught to a kindergartner.

From a strictly political perspective, it’s hard to be surprised by the lack of real specifics that Romney has offered in this area, or even to blame him: Republican foreign policy is still, in many ways, George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and George W. Bush’s foreign policy will not win anyone an election right now.

But if this were really just Romney’s standard allergy to detail—an aversion shared by plenty of other politicians, true, but one he’s elevated to an art form—that would be one thing. The truth appears to be worse: Romney is not sharing specifics because he doesn’t have any.

In Monday’s New York Times, David E. Sanger reported that some of Romney’s advisers on the subject “say they have engaged with him so little on issues of national security that they are uncertain what camp he would fall into, and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern.” Sanger’s sources weren’t even sure that Romney had been reading the position papers he’d been given.

Perhaps that’s why Romney’s forays into foreign policy thus far have been organized under a principle that can only be described as the Not-Obama Doctrine. If President Obama has done something, it is, by definition, wrong—even when, the truth is, Romney agrees with him. Their positions on Afghanistan are, functionally, the same: they both want to withdraw American troops and transition to the Afghans’ own Army in 2014. Romney criticizes Obama for a failure to get tough on Iran, but his immediate proposal is to extend sanctions against the country—the same course Obama has followed. Romney has said that he wants to find allies among the rebels in Syria and supply arms to them—a course, again, that the current Administration is already on. And though he and other Republicans accuse Obama of less than full support for Israel, the President hasn’t really broken with his predecessors in any significant way in his stance towards the country.

Not-Obama works well enough on the campaign trail. It certainly excites a base already primed to believe that everything the President does has some apologetic, blame-America-first motive behind it, if not worse. But it doesn’t get you much past that, and as we’ve already seen, it can backfire. Romney’s knee-jerk response to the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi looked plenty bad at the time. In retrospect, it looks even worse, considering the secret fund-raiser tape unearthed by Mother Jones, in which he says, referring to the hostage crisis in Iran that brought down Jimmy Carter, “If something of that nature presents itself, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.” And ironically, Romney’s fumbling has actually prevented him from taking full advantage of the genuine disaster that has been this Administration’s handling of Benghazi, both before and after the attack.

It is, admittedly, a little early for Romney to be fully committing himself to foreign policy. Despite the very good polling news he’s gotten recently, he’s hardly the President yet. But his campaign has, for some time now, been making a show of his preparations for the job—unveiling significant parts of his transition team, for instance. Besides, there’s a difference between doing some homework and none at all.

That’s the real concern here: the fact that Romney has apparently shown little interest in foreign policy, or at least in getting past the Not-Obama stage of foreign-policy thinking, is yet another indication, on top of his repudiation of his record in Massachusetts, that politics is ultimately his first priority, not governing. If he’s just thinking about foreign policy as a way to get elected, what happens if he is?